


i won't show my face here anymore

by quietroom



Category: Bastille (Band)
Genre: Gen, i have no idea how to define this, road trip au, well.... sorta kinda not really
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-12
Updated: 2016-04-12
Packaged: 2018-06-01 18:42:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,726
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6531583
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/quietroom/pseuds/quietroom
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Bastille embark on an unwilling road trip to the outskirts of east England" or, "Bastille try going to a gig but then everything goes wrong".</p>
            </blockquote>





	i won't show my face here anymore

**Author's Note:**

> important disclaimer: i have no idea how england works in general. i've never been there. never taken a road trip there. i actually live in a place very different from england. this fanfic was built on educated guesses, assumptions, and google maps, so, chances are, all the geographical info is incredibly wrong. if you see plainly wrong information, just... ignore it. it's fine. it's all okay. just go with it. i'm very sorry.
> 
> moving on: this fanfic is half banter, half dan moping around, with some bits and pieces of just purely nonsensical decisions and people being slightly mad at kyle. this is in no way biographical (or aiming to be biographical) or inspired by any real events. pretend all kinds of road signs just stopped existing at some point, or anything amongst these lines, and maybe this whole thing'll make more sense.
> 
> (also, english still isn't my native language. i tried my best though)

"Time?" Dan inquired, not bothering to look away from the road map he was holding in hands.

Will glanced wearily at his watch. "We're still late." He mutters, dropping his hand back to his side.

" _Time?_ "

"God, half past six," Kyle responded, grabbing Will's wrist to look at the time himself. "Asking what time it is every five minutes isn't going to change anything, Dan. We're late, and regardless of how fast we fucking go, we're still going to be amazingly late."

"And whose fault is that?" Woody chimed in, an annoyed tone still clinging to his voice.

Kyle rolled his eyes. "Shut up. I said I was sorry, like, a _hundred_ times now."

"And you should probably say it a hundred times more--"

"Can we just focus on trying to find out where the fuck we are?" Dan raised his voice, a bit irritated. "... Please?"

Woody tapped his fingers against the steering wheel, impatiently. "I've told you like ten times already. I saw a sign that said ' _Thetford'_."

"For some reason I don't want to believe that, because if I do I think I'll just have a panic attack." Dan had his nose almost touching the atlas, as he intensely tried to locate them in it. He only leaned back a little when Woody tapped him on the shoulder.

"The sign said that Thetford was up ahead. If I had to guess, I'd say we're close to Cambridge." Will remarked, voice still slow and quiet as always, even with the building tension around him.

Kyle huffed, a bit offended. "Guys, I'm not _that bad_ at giving directions..."

Whatever else Kyle had to say about the subject, though, he swallowed, as they drove by a sign that quite clearly stated, in large, italic letters: " _Welcome to Norwich_ ".

It took about a full on minute before any of them made a single noise.

"... Time?" Dan requested, meekly.

Will shifted in his seat, glancing at his watch once more. "Current, or the amount's gonna take to get to Southampton from here?"

 

~

 

"Can I be reminded of why we trusted Kyle to give us directions?"

Will sighed, over-dramatically, letting his head fall to a side. "Kyle said he drove to Southampton all the time with his mates or something amongst those lines. Told us he knew a shortcut, _pinky-promised_ Dan that he knew what he was doing..."

Kyle made sure he was heard when he groaned, mumbling something or other under his breath as he attempted to keep boxes from falling on his head. "Listen, I thought I knew where we were going, but my memory isn't really all that great anymore. I was _trying_ to help either way, though. That's what matters sometimes."

"Maybe you could've at least _tried_ to tell us you had no idea where you were going?"

"Oh, shush, both of you," Dan said, annoyed, looking up from the road atlas to glare at them disapprovingly. "We're in a bad enough situation as is. We don't need a fight to make it worse. Take that turn over there."

Woody does as he's instructed, though grumbled under his breath. "But really. The first bloody time we get actually called to do a gig..."

Dan stared at Woody, and only stopped when Woody rolled his eyes. "Fine. No fighting. Alright. I'm pissed though."

"We're all pretty pissed." Will muttered, still looking distractedly out Woody’s side window.

Silence fell between all of them, but Kyle suddenly decided to speak up again. "I'm sorry, okay?" As nobody responded or really reacted, he continued. "I mean, I really did think I could guide you lot there. But I did what I could with the knowledge I had."

"Take the next right." Dan muttered, finger trailing a few lines on his map.

"Oh my god, you didn't have any knowledge."

Kyle took less than a moment to retort. "Fuck off, this was my first time actually guiding anyone there. First time guiding anyone ever, actually."

"Woody, go right over there."

"Did it not come to you that you should've maybe told us that?"

"I mean, all the peer pressure--"

"Woody. _Turn right_."

"Don't go talking about 'peer pressure', you _told_ us you knew a shortcut! You suggested--"

"WOODY!" Dan shouted, and Woody, startled, stomped on the brakes, getting all of them to be thrown forwards, and Kyle to squeal as the mountain of equipment and instruments fell over him.

A car behind them honked, loudly, as Woody looked around the road to find any sign of possibly deer, but turned to find Dan with his head on his hands. "What?"

Dan has to drag in a long breath before speaking once again, though his frustration was interrupted by both the several cars honking aggressively behind them, and Kyle, shouting for help on the back with Will scrambling to try and save him from being suffocated under heavy boxes of tech and a bass case.

When he finally opened his eyes, he didn't look or attempt to address any of their current problems. Only sighed while rubbing his temples.  "Keep going forward and take the first left you see."

Woody took a moment to check on both the men on the back before nodding towards Dan, doing as he was instructed.

 

~

 

"Where are we?" Woody grumbled, scratching a side of his head. When Dan didn't respond, he turned towards him to find his head buried in the road atlas once more. He reached to tap him on the shoulder. "Dan. Where are we."

"Eyes on the road," Dan tilted the map to a side, shaking the flashlight he had been using to look at where they were going in a poor attempt to get the almost drained batteries working again. "I think... we're somewhere near Cambridge."

"... You _think_?"

"Listen, if you wanted a completely accurate location, you should've bought a fucking GPS," Dan said, impatiently, tracing his finger around thin lines that represented roads. "It's really hard to navigate around this thing when there's almost no bloody light."

"Oh my god, you're as bad as Kyle."

" _Hey._ " censured both of the men.

Woody rolled his eyes, but spotted a road splitting into two coming up right ahead. "... Oi, left or right?" He asked, and Dan raised an eyebrow at him.

"I've told you, I'm absolutely lost on the atlas."

"Okay, then. In your honest, humble opinion, do I go left or right?"

Kyle stuck his head out to the front, to take a look at the approaching decision. "Were there no signs saying where they go?" Woody shook his head, hummed negatively. "Well, this might be the most important choice we make this entire trip."

"Go straight." Will deadpanned.

"Not an option." Dan murmured, finger on his lip, now trying to find roads that split into two directions in his map.

"It could be, depending on how much we're willing to risk crashing this van." Woody's smirk grew bigger as he saw Dan frown at him out of the corner of his eyes.

"If you crash this _borrowed_ van and live, you're gonna fucking pay for the damages by yourself."

"Go left!" Kyle suggested, after apparently putting a lot of thought into it. "That's how you get out of mazes, yeah? Always going left?"

"Keeping a hand on the left wall. But as lovely as that sounds, part of me thinks we should learn from past mistakes and just... Never follow any of Kyle's directions ever again." Woody ignored as Kyle scrunched his face, going back to his seat.

"So, right it is."

"Or straight." Dan stared disapprovingly towards Will’s general direction for a moment, making him chuckle a little.

  
~

 

It was starting to get late, surprisingly late. They had been driving aimlessly for hours, and road signs and directions didn't really seem to be getting them anywhere, so it was rather easy to lose hope.

The meals at the 24/7 diner they stopped at were cheap, but not exactly tasty. Yet it was quite clear they or, well, at least some of them, might have needed a momentary break for a meal (evidenced by Woody almost lunging himself at the clerk at the convenience store right next door, because they _dared_ not to have any AA batteries in stock). As Will remarked, while they were waiting for their respective meals: _"Going around with an empty stomach is basically like us begging to get in a fight and break up."_

"How are we going to get back now, then?" Dan asked, leaning his head on his hand as he munched on something that appeared to be steak, but yet felt a lot like a strap of plastic inside his mouth. "I mean, without a light source to look at the road map."

Woody shrugged, poking at his food, lacklustre. "We can just keep driving around aimlessly. I mean, 's not much different from what we were doing when we did have access to a map."

"I like to think that we managed to get a bit closer to London."

"How the fuck do we keep getting lost, anyway?" Kyle groaned, making a rather comical face as he did so. "It shouldn't be this hard to get back to the fucking capital of the fucking country. I mean, there's signs and shit everywhere, right?"

"It also shouldn't have been hard, getting to Southampton, seeing as pretty much all we have to do is drive through one motorway..."

Kyle breathed out through his nose, irritated. "Can you just let that go, maybe?"

Woody frowned at him in response. "If you can't remember, we're in this whole situation because of _your_ mess up."

"Listen, you didn't want to go through the motorway in the first place, because _traffic_ , _we'll be late, aaah_ , or whatever," Kyle pointed his fork towards Woody, mimicking the same impatient expression he had. "I provided you with an alternative, and you went with it. Some of the fault falls on you lot too." He moved his fork around the entire group, though all the reaction he received was a sigh from Will, a huff from Woody, and a roll of eyes from Dan.

"I told you we should've taken a train." Will commented, quietly, after a few seconds of silence.

"Okay, next time, we take the train, and you carry all our equipment and instruments with you."

Will stopped for a moment to ponder on the comment, and then lowered his eyes back to his plate, focusing once more on the aimless task of stirring his food around. "Forget I said anything."

With nothing else to say, other than contemplate things they wish they had done to prevent this, they all fell silent, making the quietness of the establishment become a lot more apparent.

 

~

 

" _Woody!_ "

Woody only jerked awake when slapped on the back, and while his first reaction was to swear out loud and complain, his second was to look around, and he found himself still at the steering wheel of the van, though they were, quite obviously, not moving,

"... What?" He asked, a bit groggily. If his eyes were adjusted to the dark, he'd be able to say everyone looked pretty concerned.

"You... We should pull over," Dan murmured, and Woody does as he's instructed. "You should've told us you were tired."

"I _did_ ," Woody grumbled, turning the engine off as soon as they managed to park. "You asked if I could still drive. I said, _'I'm a bit tired'_."

"Well, maybe if you told us _'a bit tired'_ meant _'I'm so fucking tired I'll just start falling asleep while driving'_..."

Woody rubbed one of his eyes, trying to stay awake. "Where are we, now?"

Dan stared disapprovingly. "You know I don't know that."

"I think we're more near Cambridge than we were before," Kyle, just like Woody, sounded very tired. "But that's just a guess. Mostly. Not like I'd know."

"We need a new driver..." Dan scratched his stubble, not sounding very optimistic either. "Kyle, can you...?"

"Other than the fact that if I drive and we're pulled over there's a chance we'll get fined because I have no ID on me or a driver's license, I'm just as bloody tired as Woody is," he mumbled, and can immediately feel Dan scramble to try and find a way around this. "Can't you drive?"

"I don't have my glasses with me."

Kyle raised an eyebrow. "Aren't you wearing contacts?"

Dan sighed. "I lost mine. Was due to getting new ones in a few days. Thought I could get away with not wearing them just to look cool at the gig, I dunno," before anyone can even say anything about the subject, he speaks up again. "I know, it was a fucking dumb thing to do, I'm sorry."

"Jesus, we definitely need a tour manager..."

"Why aren’t we considering Will?"

Woody tried to conceal one of his yawns with one of his hand, but was unsuccessful, as Dan started yawning a moment after. "Will doesn’t know how to drive. Not to mention the fact that I think he's asleep right now."

"... What? Isn't he, like, 40 or something?"

"I'm awake." Mumbled Will, unamused, speaking for the first time since they had gotten back into the van.

Kyle turned towards Will, still widely surprised. "Aren't you like, 40 or something?"

"Oh my fucking god, let's just go look for a motel or something. Woody, can you still drive for a bit?"

 

~

 

Woody had fallen back asleep while they were bantering, so, the answer was quite clearly _"no"_.

Despite Dan being completely against the idea of pulling over and just sleeping on the van "for a bit" (having spent most of the process of pulling over making very reasonable claims of "we could get seriously fined for doing this", "the van isn't even ours, isn't even _mine_ , do you know how much trouble _I'd_ get in if it got tow-trucked away?", "honestly, there isn't even anywhere comfortable to sleep back there", "there are _serious_ risks in sleeping on the back of a van. Specially the back of a two-seater van. You could roll over in your sleep and very easily knock over some pile of instruments over yourself and, like, die", "no, in that situation we're all very heavy sleepers and we wouldn't wake up if you were screaming for help", "yes, I'm _definitely_ saying you'd die instantaneously-- look, that's not the point I'm trying to make here!"), it was 3 against 1.

Well, more or less 2 against 1, seeing as Kyle raised Will's hand for him when they were voting on what to do, because he said he was "honestly indifferent".

After several minutes of bickering back and forth about democracy, Woody yelled out for them to shut the fuck up, having already somehow made himself comfortable enough amongst the several piles of instruments, and that ended up being what settled it for them.

Kyle passed out just as quickly as Woody as soon as he flopped down on the back. Will seemed to be having a nice enough time shifting around his seat, trying to get comfortable, and Dan, on the other hand, was having some trouble even closing his eyes.

So he tried slipped out of the van as quietly as he could, closing the door behind him carefully enough not to wake any of his bandmates up. But yet, Will was specially quick to take notice of his disappearance.

 

~

 

Will had obviously taken note of the fact that Dan had bought a pack of cigarettes from the convenience store. He remembered Woody snapping _"no smoking inside the van"_ pretty much as soon as they had closed the doors, and when all eyes were deviated towards Dan, they found him fiddling with the tab of the box, distractedly snapping it open and closed again.

 _"God, I'm not,"_ he grumbled, the slightest bit offended at the implications. _"I don't even have a lighter."_

... Which Will quickly found out was a lie, as he quietly stepped outside of the van to find Dan quite clearly surrounded by a cloud of grey smoke.

As soon as Dan noticed Will approaching, he began to wave off the smoke. "Sorry, I... thought you were sleeping." He said, quietly, giving Will a quick glance before directing his eyes back to his shoes.

"You okay?" Will asked, mimicking Dan's gestures and leaning against the van.

Dan scratched the back of his head. "Uh, yeah," he shrugged, indifferently. "Fine, I guess."

"Really? Today hasn't been all that great."

"Oh, hasn't it. I hadn't even noticed," Will instinctively dodged to avoid the smoke that Dan blew out in his direction. "... Sorry." He murmured, half-heartedly.

Will waved him off, or tried to fan the smoke away from him. Either way, Dan didn't really seem to care. "Yeah... You're pissed."

"Oh, god, how did you _know?_ "

The sarcasm that lined his tone irked Will quite a bit, this being one of the first times he caught Dan in a bad _bad_ mood. He decided to tread carefully. "I'm sorry, I know you were excited about the gig."

"It's fine, shit happens, yeah?" Will hummed in response, not very sure what to say. "I mean, it can't... Nevermind."

"It can't get any worse?"

"... Yeah, that."

They paused. Dan took another drag of his cigarette, the ends sparkling a little, providing them with a very tiny amount of light. Will pretended he wasn't uncomfortable being around him while he smoked.

Dan chuckled, and it's a bit of a relieving sight to see him laughing again, despite the smoke being blown out of his mouth. "For some reason I was expecting it to start pouring if I said that."

Will copied his smile, leaning back a little. "Knowing how our day went, that doesn't sound so off."

"Have our lives gotten so ridiculous we can start thinking like characters in crappy comedies?"

"Are you implying you _don't_ usually think like a character in a crappy comedy?"

Dan laughed, and Will felt momentarily proud for helping him better his mood. But they quickly fell silent once more, and all they have for a good few seconds is smoke, the weirdly dry air, and the sparks on the tip of Dan's cigarette.

"God," for the first time during this conversation, Dan deliberately blew his smoke in the opposite direction from Will, and he's very flattered for a good few seconds. "Do you ever just... Think about _this?_ "

Will gnawed on a fingernail, distractedly, as he responded. "What d'you mean?"

"Like, _this_ ..." He gesticulated towards himself, Will, their van, the air around them. He isn't very surprised when Will raised one of his eyebrows. "I mean, is... _This,_ really worth all the effort? Rehearsing, running blindly after gigs, stuffing ourselves in two-seater vans and taking hours long roadtrips around the country... I feel like I'm just wasting everyone's time sometimes. Like... Today."

"Oh, come on, you know today wasn't your fault," There wasn't really much to look at other than fields of grass, that were already incredibly shadowed by darkness, so Will focused on biting off tips of his nails. "If it makes you feel better, you can just blame it on Kyle."

"... Still, if we weren't in a band, we wouldn't be going through this," Will realised he was now dealing with a dreary Dan, instead of a slightly infuriated Dan. He watched as he tapped one end of his cigarette against his lips.  "Woody and Kyle wouldn't just be wasting all their vacation days, I wouldn't be on the verge of getting fired, and you would still have a job yourself--"

"Pfft. That's not true."

"No, I mean, honestly. I'm absolutely sure next time I come into work they'll just straight up fire me. I've skipped out on so many days without warning, I'm honestly surprised nobody's called me in yet..."

"I meant me having a job. I definitely, regardless of being in a band or not, would still not have a job."

"... Oh. Well, don't be so pessimistic, now."

Will huffed. "Look who's talking."

Despite everything, Dan spoke with a smile clearly filtering his words. "I have a right to be pessimistic."

"You definitely do not." Will commented, lightly tapping his feet on the ground.

Dan shifted, and, eyes now adjusted to the dark, Will could tell his smile had vanished. "Why? It's fucking obvious none of this' going to work out," Dan had began shaking one of his legs, anxiously. "About this time next year we'll have disbanded and we'll be back... We'll be at even worse jobs than the ones we have now. Nobody will even fucking remember 'Bastille'," he bitterly made quote marks with his fingers, and sighed when he dropped his hands back to his sides. "I'm wasting everyone's time with this."

"Oh, shut the fuck up, will you?" Will rolled his eyes, though noticed he was probably speaking a bit too loud when Dan visibly flinched in surprise at his volume. He glanced at the van behind them, and when nobody inside complained, he continued. "You're not wasting anybody's time. We're all here because we want to, and besides, we made well good music. In the leastest, we'll be incredibly popular within the indie music community. You need to believe in yourself more."

There is a pause, as Dan tried to avoid Will as he stared at him. After what felt like a really long moment, Dan chuckled, lightly. "You sound like Woody."

"Well, as he's currently passed out on the back of a shitty van, I feel like I'm temporarily in charge of the 'stop Dan from moping around and being a pessimistic little shit' department for now."

"Huh."

Will knocked elbows with him, stretching a small smile. "See, I'm qualified enough. You're smiling now."

"Yeah... Thanks, Will."

They stand, motionless and quiet for quite a few seconds, this time with way less tension suffocating them. "Also," Dan remarked, and Will turned back to look at him. "'Leastest' isn't a word.

"Oh, shut up. It's late."

Dan laughed, and put his cigarette out by crushing it with the heel of his shoe. He tapped Will on the shoulder, lightly. "Come on, let's go to sleep."

"Aw, you're not even gonna let me mope about my problems to you?"

"Fuck no. I'm exhausted."

"Wow, rude?" Dan grins, once again, and Will can't help but smile back.


End file.
